This guy’s looking down at me. I’m on the ground, against a tree in Golden Gate Park, and he just stands there staring. A band’s playing. There’s kind of like a festival going on, I guess. This is the third band up since I got here, I don’t know, maybe two hours ago. Has sort of a country vibe going.
The grass smells sharp and sweet like it’s just been cut. There’s a fresh and gentle breeze carrying salt air from the Bay. Couples sit on blankets with Tupperware and plastic forks and spoons and bottles of wine. I snatched one when this guy and this gal weren’t looking. They were dancing and I picked it up off their blanket. Really they were more like swaying, arms out, barefoot, faces turned to the sky, eyes closed. Maybe they’re a little tight and that’s why they’re dancing. I understand that. I don’t dance unless I’m drunk. Whatever. They didn’t see me and still don’t know that anything’s missing. They’re still listening to the music, their backs to me. Other people stand and sway to the rhythm. Young colts and old fucks like me. A warm day, all shorts and crop tops, and dudes bare-chested.
I remember working construction one summer as a kid, teenager really. Pushing wheelbarrows filled with concrete, laying tar paper, the sun above us, our bodies sucking in the heat. My skin turned to bronze. I walked home draping my T-shirt around my neck, a sweat-soaked scarf. Girls in halter tops and short shorts walking past, do a double take, dragging their cunts on the sidewalk for me, I knew. I felt my power. Went to The Spot, ordered a pitcher of beer I drank by myself. I got drunk with friends one night and bit my glass, breaking it. I spit the broken pieces out of my mouth, laughed, wiped my cut lips with the back of my hand.
Have I seen you before? the guy goes.
I squint up at him, raise my chin.
Huh?
Have I seen you before?
I don’t know. Maybe. Why? What do you want?
The guy shrugs, shakes his head. Nothing.
He’s got on a wrinkled button-down shirt that’s a little large for him and blue jeans, also too big. Thrift store clothes or some agency’s donation closet, I’m thinking. That kind of stuff never fits right. That kind of need isn’t too particular either. His wet hair dampens his shoulders. I don’t know him, don’t think so anyway.
At Fresh Start, he says. You were in detox. I was in the bed next to you.
I turn to the band. An older woman’s singing a John Prine tune, “Angel from Montgomery.” I’m trying to think, When was I in detox? Four days ago, maybe. I had pneumonia. I didn’t know it then, but I was coughing so much that Katie sent me to General the next morning and the doctors there kept me for a minute. I was in a bed with beeping machines on either side, and I had an IV in my left arm filling me with antibiotics and Valium too, so I could ease off the booze without major withdrawal. It was a nice feeling, a different kind of buzz, I got to say, smooth and nice like the colors of a fall day when you first wake up and feel the cool dawn air, and it lifted me and I felt myself sailing through air, more like floating, really, no speed to it at all, and I thought of my mom’s driveway and the heavy branches of elms that stretched over it and the shadows and squirrels in the shadows and how I came home from that construction job, the squirrels running, and my mother said, Put your shirt on. You look like a common laborer, and the girls cruising past as I tugged it back on, felt it stick to my sweating arms, cling to my chest, cicadas buzzing through the humidity.
I don’t remember you, I tell the guy.
Yeah, it was you next to me. You were sick. You left in the morning, I think.
I look at him.
Sounds like me.
He nods. It doesn’t matter to him if I remember. He keeps talking anyway.
I needed shelter. I’d been sleeping in my car and wanted a break. There was this social worker, I forget his name.
Oscar, I say.
Yeah, that’s right. That’s his name. He said the shelter was full but he could get me into detox. Are you an alcoholic? he goes, and I go, No, and he goes, Listen to me. The shelter is full but I can get you into detox if you’re an alcoholic, understand? So I’m going to ask you again. Are you an alcoholic? I didn’t even know what detox was, man. Hell, I’d never heard of Fresh Start. A cop made me move my car that morning and told me about it. Anyway, I got it, you know what I’m saying? I got Oscar’s drift, so I said, Yes, I’m an alcoholic, and he put me in detox.
Oscar always has his game on.
I suppose, the guy says.
I close my eyes. My chest still hurts from the pneumonia every time I take a deep breath. The woman has stopped singing. A guitar player strums something low and slow, kind of twangy. A harmonica kicks in. The sun warms my face. Before I was discharged from General, the social worker gave me a two-week referral to the Apollo, one of the shittier welfare hotels on Sixth Street. She also found some clean clothes—a 49ers T-shirt, blue jeans, and white socks. I took off my hospital gown, dressed, wondered who the clothes had belonged to—who died and left me their rags? Would somebody see me in the dead guy’s clothes and think I’m him? Would he be alive again for just that moment? Oh, sorry, I thought you were somebody else, I can hear someone saying to me. The social worker told me not to think like that. But I do. I think that way about myself in my room at the Apollo with just my radio and a Penthouse magazine I found. How many dead guys have worn these clothes? No one knows, I’m sure. I feel bad for them. Not bad, I guess, just weird. Like putting on someone else’s skin. I’ll be one of them: dead someday. I’ve been wearing these duds now for three days. They got my stink. Whoever wore them before is totally gone. They’re fucking mine now. I could use a comb. Some deodorant and toothpaste too.
The woman starts singing again. I don’t recognize the song. I didn’t know there’d be music. I just wanted out of the Apollo. There are so many rats on the sill I won’t open the windows. The hall shower doesn’t work and the cracked sink in my room sags off the wall, leaking. Cockroaches converge at night on the brown carpet. Rice Krispies, I say when I step on them. I stay up nights and sleep in the day, avoiding the funk of my room behind closed eyes. I turn the radio on at night for the company of better-off voices. This morning, that wasn’t enough. I needed real people, people I could see, so I caught the Muni for the Haight, got off at Masonic and walked to the park.
How long were you in detox? I ask the guy.
I’m still there, he says. They’re letting me stay till next week when I go into a forty-five-day recovery program. I don’t need it. I’m not a drunk, but they say that after you complete it they’ll send you to a halfway house and help you find a job. So I’m thinking, Why not? That Oscar guy gave me a day pass today because I’ve been going a little crazy sitting around Fresh Start.
I hear you. You want a drink?
No, man. Shit, what did I just say? I can’t go back with booze on my breath. They’d throw me out and that’d be that.
You said you’re not an alcoholic.
I’m not.
One drink won’t fuck up your breath.
Sure it will. I’m no drunk but I’ve had a few drinks in my time. I know.
I bet. He doesn’t say anything more but he’s thinking about it, I can see it in his face. That look that says he’s getting a contact high just talking about drinking. I got the bottle I stole behind me. I feel it against the small of my back. The couple’s still dancing, the sun beating down on them, their long hair sticking to their necks. I remember this woman I met in a bar, The Déjà Vu, in my construction days. She worked at a Pizza Hut and asked me to dance. It was a slow number. A mirror ball turned slowly above our heads, all sorts of colored lights spinning on the floor and covering our bodies with thin hues of pink and purple and green that barely penetrated the dark. I held her, felt her tits on my chest, her waist against my belt buckle, the feel of her back against the palm of my hand. The press of her against me.
Well, if you change your mind, I say, and lean to one side and show him the bottle.
No thanks.
OK. You can sit down.
I don’t know.
OK.
I’m not drinking.
You can sit. No one will smell sitting on your breath.
